


this love is difficult (but it's real)

by jaeson



Category: Produce 101 (TV), Wanna One (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-26 04:58:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12051813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaeson/pseuds/jaeson
Summary: Guanlin knows he should be paying attention, or at least listening to the older boy, but all he can do is steal glances at Jihoon and wonder how to initiate some body contact, how to bring himself to reach out and take a hold of Jihoon’s hand.Or: The three times Guanlin wants to initiate skinship with Jihoon but is too shy/nervous to do so and one time Jihoon notices and helps him out.





	this love is difficult (but it's real)

**1.**

It’s the first day in their new dorm and after having pigged out on all kinds of food to celebrate the occasion, all of the members are in the living room watching a movie. 

Normally, not all of them would fit in the room, even less with all of them lying down, but Jisung had convinced them to sleep together since it was their first day in the dorm. That’s why they had dragged some of their mattresses into the living room and created a huge make shift bed. 

As Guanlin glances around, two things catch his eyes. 

The first thing he notices are actually two people. 

Seongwoo and Daniel. 

They are the only ones lying on the couch, Daniel’s arm tightly wrapped around Seongwoo’s waist as Seongwoo is sprawled all over Daniel. They are almost chest to chest, Seongwoo’s face hidden in the crook of Daniel’s neck. 

Guanlin guesses he must have fallen asleep sometime during the movie. 

The both of them look cute, Seongwoo’s face relaxed in his sleep, Daniel happily looking down at him with the softest of smiles. 

The other thing that had caught his attention is actually Jihoon. 

Said boy is lying right next to Guanlin with his lips in a smile and his eyes sparkling as one of the main characters cracks a joke. 

They are lying closer to each other than they usually would. 

Guanlin wants to reach out and tug on Jihoon’s arm until the boy understands and rests his head on Guanlin’s chest but just the thought of doing so makes his heart feel like it’s about to explode. 

Still, Guanlin scoots even closer to Jihoon, carefully to do so without the other boy noticing. 

When he glances at the other boy nervously, his heart beating so fast it might as well fall out of his chest. However, when he looks at Jihoon again, he is relieved to see that he is too focused on the movie to realize what Guanlin is doing. 

The younger boy waits a few minutes before he tries to reach out for Jihoon’s shirt. He, painfully slowly, stretches out his hands towards Jihoon. 

Every time his hand is only a millimeter nearer to the older boy, his stomach tightens in anxiety and his heartbeat gets faster without a real reason as to why. When his fingertips reach the soft fabric of Jihoon’s shirt, it feels like his skin is burning. 

Guanlin backs his hand off immediately, wiggles away from Jihoon in a flash of panic and looks at his hand in surprise, trying to calm himself down. 

*** 

“Guanlin?” Jihoon murmurs some minutes later, his hand caressing Guanlin’s forearm. ”Why are you so far away, suddenly?” 

“Uhm, I just… I just felt too hot,” Guanlin replies, lump in his throat. 

“Ah, okay,” the older boy nods, removing his hand from Guanlin. 

As soon as Jihoon’s gentle fingers are gone from his skin, he wants to tell Jihoon to touch him again. But somehow, he can’t. 

*** 

For the rest of the night, he sneaks some glances at Jihoon, his body itching to get closer and have Jihoon in his arms. 

**2.**

“Jihoon, are you going to sit there all alone sulking for the rest of the day?” Jisung asks with a smirk. 

The younger boy just sticks his tongue out and crosses his arms over his chest. Guanlin thinks it’s one of the cutest things he has ever seen as he smiles he moves forward and plops down beside Jihoon. 

“Why are you sulking anyway?” Guanlin says. 

“Because Jisung and Seongwoo are assholes,” Jihoon replies, making sure to be loud enough for both of the older boys to hear. “They were teasing me the whole time we were in the car because I made a tiny mistake.” 

“Aw, how pitiful,” he laughs, his hand reaches out to pat Jihoon’s head but stops midway. 

Just like the last time he had tried to touch Jihoon, his heart starts to speed up in his chest, thundering against his rib cage, a lump forming in his throat. His mouth, all of a sudden, feels dry and his skin is on fire. 

He is aware that he’s probably blushing, too. 

Thankfully Jihoon is too distracted by Jisung wiggling his eyebrows at him and Seongwoo sending hearts their way to notice Guanlin’s hand awkwardly hovering above his head. 

Guanlin, for at least five minutes, stares at his hand, trying to find out _why the hell he just couldn’t touch Jihoon without feeling like he is going to have a panic attack or without his brain shutting off just at the thought of doing so_ . 

“You’re on my side, right Guanlin?” Jihoon snaps him out of his trance. 

He looks at his hand again, then back at Jihoon and nods without thinking about it. Jihoon grins at him with the cutest of grins and taps him on the shoulder before running off to play fight with Seongwoo. 

**3.**

Jihoon is so unbelievably close to Guanlin all he would need to do for Jihoon to be cuddling against his side is to inch just a centimeter closer. 

*** 

_They had filmed for their variety show today, luckily Jihoon and him had been paired together so they couldn’t be more than one meter away from each other. Jihoon had played well with him, admiring him for his basketball skills and joking around whenever he got the chance._

_It had been a pretty good day, well, until now._

_Before they go to sleep, the staff drops a bomb on them._

_“You guys thought it was over, right?” the scriptwriter questions, a smirk on her face. “Well, surprise then, we told you in the morning, it’s twenty-four hours.”_

_“What?” Jisung yells, frown on his face._

_“The day is not over yet, you need to sleep in the same bed with your partner,” she laughs when almost all of them groan, complaining about how they are too big for the single beds._

*** 

Guanlin knows for a fact Jihoon is not sleeping, not when his breathing is not stable yet and he tosses and turns beside him. He wants to stop the other, put a hand on his waist, tug him closer and feel Jihoon’s breathe tickle his neck. 

He turns over to face Jihoon. 

His eyes follow the slope of Jihoon’s nose, he looks at the other boy’s slightly parted lips and the way his chest rises and falls. 

“You can’t feel asleep either, huh?” Guanlin murmurs, eyes fixed on Jihoon. 

The older boy opens his eyes and smiles, moving around so that he now, too, is facing Guanlin. If the lights were on, Jihoon would have probably been able to see how Guanlin’s cheek slowly turn into a shade of red. 

“Nope,” Jihoon laughs. “But I’m glad you can’t either.” 

They stay silent after that, just looking and smiling at each other as if they weren’t wasting their precious sleeping time. 

Jihoon moves a little bit closer to Guanlin then, saying something about how he is almost about to fall out of the bed and suddenly Guanlin feels like he can’t breathe because Jihoon’s arms and legs are carefully pressed against his, Jihoon’s mouth only a few inches away. 

Guanlin feels the urge to close the gap between the two of them once again but his brain is failing him. Thoughts like “Jihoon is so near, fuck” and “What should I do?” begin to pile up in his head and Guanlin can’t stop them, can’t control them like he wants to. 

He just wants _Jihoon to be closer_ , he can’t really comprehend why his body is making such a big deal out of it, why his heart goes insane just at the thought, why his hands stop moving and start to tremble from nervousness as soon as he tries to touch Jihoon, why a lump forms in his throat and his mouth feels dry when he thinks of asking Jihoon to come closer to him instead. 

The next time he looks at Jihoon, the other boy is sleeping soundly, breathing evenly on Guanlin’s nose. 

**+1.**

Guanlin is so stressed and just, plainly said, frustrated with himself, for not even being able to be one meter away from Jihoon without his heart feeling like it will explode in a million of pieces, that on his free night off he doesn’t go to sleep. 

Instead he steals the tablet from in between a sleeping Jaehwan’s hands, sits down on the couch in the living room and googles “how to stop being too shy to touch my friend? Boyfriend?”. 

He clicks link after link, reading through all the tips – he even writes them down in a little notebook his mother had gifted him at least three years ago. 

Guanlin is so focused on filtering out the good advices from the bad ones that he doesn’t even notice Jihoon and Daniel, who had both just gotten back from an individual schedule, sitting down beside him. 

“What are you doing?” Daniel inquires while peeking at the tablet. 

Guanlin is so startled he almost throws the electronic device across the room. Thank God though, he doesn’t, instead he hugs it tightly into his chest and mutters a “nothing” underneath his breathe before standing up and closing the incognito tab he had open. 

“Where you looking up girl group performances?” Jihoon wiggles his eyebrows. 

The younger boy just frowns at him and shakes his head. He puts the tablet down on the armrest of the couch and sits back down, this time though, he sits only next to Jihoon. 

Daniel, thankfully, breaks the silence by telling Guanlin every single detail of how the shooting for “Let’s Eat Dinner” went, he tells him about how they had to stop the shooting because of the rain and how a lot of fans ended up crowding them, Kang Hodong even complimenting them for their huge popularity. 

Guanlin knows he should be paying attention, or at least listening to the older boy, but all he can do is steal glances at Jihoon and wonder how to initiate some body contact, how to bring himself to reach out and take a hold of Jihoon’s hand. 

He scoots closer to Jihoon, nodding his head and looking at Daniel for a second. 

Now that the side of his legs are pressed against Jihoon’s, his heart is doing that weird thing, where it begins to hammer in his chest, again. It feels like it’s taking part in a race to find out how fast it can be before Guanlin has a heart attack. 

Nonetheless he keeps this legs were they are, adverting his gaze from his legs and looking up at Daniel, who is wildly gesturing around and teasing Jihoon about how he had been able to eat first. 

He rises his hand from where it’s resting on his lap and slowly moves it so that it’s nearer to Jihoon’s own. 

When he is about to **_finally_** hold onto the other’s hand, he feels that same strange sensation in his stomach – Guanlin knows people would describe them as butterflies from excitement or something like that but for him, they feel weird, make him feel anxious and afraid, make him question all that he’s doing. 

Guanlin sighs. 

He retracts his hand again, puts it back on his lap and fidgets nervously with his fingers. 

Suddenly though, Jihoon’s hand is on his. 

It’s warm and soft and all that Guanlin had imagined it would be. He looks up at Jihoon, gaping and completely ignoring the way Daniel stops and looks at their hands with a knowing grin for a moment before he continues talking. 

Jihoon only winks at him and then goes back to listening to Daniel. 

Although the older boy is not looking at him, he interlocks their fingers together and strokes the back of Guanlin’s hand with his thumb in relaxing, circular motions. 

Guanlin’s heart still feels like it’s running a marathon, the butterflies in his stomach are still there too, but somehow, they feel nicer, make him feel giddy instead of angsty. 

The feeling Guanlin has now is one he wants to capture in a bottle and let free when he is feeling down. 

He looks at their intertwined hands, a blush on his face, and smiles. 

*** 

“Daniel…” Seongwoo whines, still half-asleep, and rubs his eyes with one hand. “Come to bed, you have an early schedule tomorrow.” 

Guanlin, Jihoon and Daniel all simultaneously turn around and look at Seongwoo, all of them startled by the sudden appearance of the older boy. 

Of course, Daniel is the first to snap out of it, standing up while laughing and making baby noises. 

“Aw, look how cute you are when you are worried about me and half-asleep,” he says when he brings Seongwoo closer for a hug and kisses the other boy’s temple lovingly. 

Guanlin feels kind of jealous while watching both of the older boys disappear into their room. He wants to be like that too, wants skinship to come as easily to him as it comes to them, wishes he could hug Jihoon just like that as well. 

“Let’s go to sleep, too,” Jihoon says, snapping Guanlin out from his thoughts. 

He nods, smiling when he notices Jihoon hadn’t let go from his hand, and walks over to their door. When they open it, they realize none of their members are sleeping – Woojin playing games with one of their other tablets, Minhyun typing speedily on his phone and Jaehwan listening to music in his bed. 

None of them notice them though, too concentrated on what they are doing. 

Jihoon leads them to Guanlin’s bed, lying down unceremoniously and tugging on Guanlin’s hand until the younger boy is also lying in the bed. He gets the blanket from the bottom of the furniture and drapes it all over the both of them. 

“It’s warm,” Guanlin mutters. “Just like your hand.” 

“Is that a good thing?” Jihoon asks with a grin. 

“Yes,” he answers, nodding and squeezing the other’s hand. “I have been wondering for a while how it would feel like to hold hands with you.” 

As soon as the words come out of his mouth, he wants to slam his head into the nearest wall because shit, this is the most embarrassing moment in his life. 

Jihoon, though, doesn’t laugh at him, nor does he tease him. 

“I know,” the older boy acknowledges. 

Guanlin doesn’t know how to reply to that, so he doesn’t. He, however, does try to stop his face from getting even redder than it already. 

“If you were wondering, I was curious, too,” Jihoon says a few minutes later. 

“Really?” 

“Yeah,” the older sighs and turns to face Guanlin. “I was wondering how cuddling would feel like with you, too. Do you remember the first night at the dorm? All I could think about was how it would be like to snuggle with you.” 

“Me too!” Guanlin exclaims excitedly, unconsciously scooting closer to Jihoon. “I tried to… but I would always get so nervous whenever I was close to touching you.” 

“Well,” Guanlin follows the way Jihoon’s tongue moves to swipe over the other’s lip. “Can we cuddle now then? I mean, if we both want to know what it feels like… we should try it out, right?” 

“Y-Yeah,” he nods. 

Jihoon smiles. 

He happily takes a hold of Guanlin’s arm and stretches it out, then he lets his head rest on it. Guanlin reciprocates the older boy’s touch by slinging an arm around Jihoon’s waist and pulling him closer. Jihoon giggles into the skin of Guanlin’s neck, his breath tickling it and making a shiver run down Guanlin’s spine. 

*** 

“We should…” Jihoon sleepily grins at him from where he is still probed on Guanlin’s arm the next day. “Cuddle more often. It makes me sleep so much better.” 

Guanlin laughs, his hand coming up to pat Jihoon’s head lovingly, when it stops midway and his heart starts thundering in his chest, Jihoon is there to take a hold of it and put it on his head himself. Guanlin snorts but still proceeds to caress Jihoon’s hair softly, smiling at the way Jihoon’s eyes close in contentment. 

“Let’s do this every day now,” Guanlin suggests, scooting closer to Jihoon and, after hesitating for a second, placing a kiss on Jihoon’s forehead. 

“Okay,” Jihoon agrees. 

He surges up and, instead of how Guanlin had kissed him on the forehead, pecks Guanlin on the lips sweetly before he lays back down with a soft, small, shy smile on his face. 

**Author's Note:**

> the panwink of the week is also here! this fic hit too close to him bc it happened to me before but it didn't end as nicely lmao
> 
> i hope it's alright, this too, was rushed and i'm not all too content with it, but i still hope you guys like it enough to leave some feedback in the comments! 
> 
> also, if you have any requests my tumblr is ongsniel and my twitter is @onghwangism. thank you so much for taking your time to read this!


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